Woodstock Film Festival: It's the end of the world, and filmmaker feels fine (VIDEO)

By Paula Ann Mitchell

Saturday, October 5, 2013

WOODSTOCK, N.Y. -- Eddie Mullins is one devoted filmmaker.

The Kingston resident, who wrote and directed the film "Doomsdays," even was willing to destroy his girlfriend's 1975 International Harvester Scout, worth about $10,000, for a scene in the dark comedy featured at this year's Woodstock Film Festival.

"We sacrificed it to the movie gods and immortalized it," said Mullins, a Virginia native who moved to Kingston four years ago.

The 91-minute "Doomsdays" is Mullins' debut feature film. Parts of it were shot in Kingston and the town of Shandaken.

The car scene was shot in the Woodstock hamlet of Bearsville, and Mullins said there is, in fact, a lot of property damage in the film.

The story follows two doomsday-obsessed vagabonds, Dirty Fred and Bruho, who "eke out a marginal, madcap existence looting off-season vacation homes in the Catskills," the film's synopsis states.

Their commitment to the lifestyle is challenged, however, when a runaway boy and aimless young woman join their ranks.

Mullins said the idea came from some documentaries he had seen and some nonfiction he had read -- all of which conveyed the world was on the brink of collapse due to things like climate change.

"It was the heavy number of glooming global crises that each person has to deal with, and I thought, 'What about characters that are such true believers that there's no future in conventional society that they drop out?'" he said. "They've given up so completely that they break into unoccupied vacation homes and exploit all the resources ... and then move on once they've exhausted them or are chased off."

Mullins, who studied film at New York University and earned his master's degree in literature at Northwestern University, at one time worked as a reporter for The Associated Press in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He then worked as a movie critic for a decade but said he lost his job, "like everybody else."

"That was the world's way of telling me to make a movie," Mullins said.

He and his girlfriend, Janet Hicks, moved to Kingston in 2009 and opened their 800-square-foot One Mile Gallery at 475 Abeel St.

Mullins said he often used his home in Kingston as a location in "Doomsdays" and housed his acting crew at frontman Justin Rice's home on Stuyvesant Street in the city.

"It was such a boon for the project because our budget and schedule did not really allow for rehearsals, and having the actors all live together gave them the opportunity to quickly establish a sense of natural rapport," he said.

One of the things Mullins considers remarkable about the film is the way it was shot -- nixing the obligatory "a-cut-every-second" editing style. It instead emphasizes deep-focus photography and the complex staging of actors, Mullins said.

"It paid some wonderful dividends and was also economical," he said. "If you shoot everything in one shot, you have to get everything right, and once you do it, you can move on."

The film, making its U.S. debut at the festival, was screened in Rosendale on Thursday and at the Woodstock Playhouse on Friday, and Mullins said the reaction to it is different with each audience.

"It's strange. Every audience has a different idea of what the funny parts are. I thought at the first screening, people will laugh at x,y and z, and you see it again in a different town, and they're laughing at something else ... and at things that were not meant to be funny at all," he said.

"Even violence, people even laugh at that, but the one thing ... people don't expect seeing in an independent film is the amount of destruction in it," he added. "We really do smash quite a lot of things. There's a genuine disregard for property, and people do enjoy it. It's living vicariously."

Mullins said that after the Woodstock Film Festival, "Doomsdays" will move on to festivals in New Hampshire,Virginia and England.

"We're lining up a fairly rigorous festival tour, so I feel pretty optimistic about the future of this movie," he said.